While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman, the late Amos Tversky, and others, including Shane Frederick (who developed the bat-and-ball question), demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether.

This article is about the sort of thing I say all the time: The human mind is bad at thinking. We tend to assume that our brains do things mostly right. In fact, our brains mostly do whatever it takes not to get killed, and to pass on our genes. It turns out, that requires us to understand quite a lot of things very badly.

There were a few troubling points, that I wasn't previously aware of:

The results were quite disturbing. For one thing, self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.”

In fact, it seems that people who rank higher on scales of intelligence have bigger bias blind spots than everyone else. (Although, they used SAT scores as a measure of intelligence, so that might not be incredibly informative.)

The bottom line, it seems, is that the difference between the way we perceive ourselves and the way we perceive other people is, so far, insurmountable. What this says about philosophy, my major, I'm not sure.